One soda a week changes kids’ brains / A whale carried a 19th-century harpoon for over 100 years / A radioactive jet is aimed at Earth

A King’s College London study of 9,632 children ages 9 to 11 in the ABCD Study found that even one caffeinated drink per week — mostly soda — was linked to smaller cortical surface area across 22 brain regions, with more caffeine linked to less sleep, and both factors associated with more mental health problems six and eighteen months later. A 2007 discovery getting renewed attention: Iñupiat hunters in Alaska harvested a 50-ton bowhead whale and found a fragment of a 19th-century bomb lance embedded near its shoulder blade — a weapon designed to explode inside a whale, manufactured between 1879 and 1885, that the whale had carried for over a century after surviving the original strike. Scientists estimate the whale was 115 to 130 years old at death. And astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in our galaxy — a stellar black hole called IRAS 18293-0941, hidden behind a thick dust veil 12,000 light-years away, shooting a plasma jet directly toward Earth at 75% the speed of light. Scientists say there is no danger. Plus a 99-year-old wing-walker, a brewery ghost, the Andy Warhol fraud sentence, and a front-yard Egyptian treasure. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.